This invention relates to an electrical connector, and more particularly, to an electrical connector of the insulation displacement connector-type and a method for connecting a plurality of coax cables to a predetermined contact of the electrical connector and providing a common ground termination in conjunction therewith.
There is currently available insulation displacement connectors which are used to produce a cable harness whereby a wire having some dielectric covering (insulation) is forcibly inserted into a contact, the contact being structured to pierce or cut through the insulation and to make contact with the metal conductor (i.e., wire) thereby eliminating the step of stripping the insulation from the wire before making the electrical connection of the wire to the contact. The insulation displacement connector (IDC) contact has been developed such that a highly reliable electrical connection is made and has proved to be a highly efficient technique for connecting ribbon cables. No other connections are required when wires of the type mentioned above are used in conjunction with the insulation displacement connector. However, when a plurality of coax cables form the cable harness, an additional connection must be made; namely, the drain wire (i.e., ground shield and/or the ground wire) must also be connected to a common electrical terminal.
There presently exists coaxial ribbon cable consisting of individual coaxial cables encased in a PVC jacket making up a standard flat ribbon cable configuration. Each coaxial lead has a solid center conductor (wire) and a foil shield with a drain wire. This construction allows the cable to be cut in any length maintaining the exact positioning of the center conductor (wire) and drain wire.
Through the use of stripping and terminating equipment, well known to those skilled in the art, all conductors are stripped simultaneously and mass terminated. On the connector, the signal conductors (i.e., wires) are terminated on one side of the connector and the drain wires are attached to the opposite side (the connector having two rows of contacts). These operations greatly reduce assembly time, damage and overall applied cost. However, one row of contacts is dedicated to terminating the drain wires, thereby cutting in half the amount of contacts available for connecting the signal conductors (i.e., wires).
The ground termination block provided by the present invention allows all of the contacts of the connector to be utilized for the signal conductors of the coax cable, and also provides for using individual coax cables, rather than ribbon cable, for the cable harness. Existing ribbon cable drain wires are in between signal conductors and dielectric materials limiting the size of the diameter of the dielectric, thereby limiting higher range of characteristic impedances of the coax. An orientation bar of the present invention aligns the drain wires to allow for maximum dielectric diameters, thereby maximizing the higher characteristic impedance range of the coax cable. Further, when the contacts of the connector are used to terminate the drain wire, the diameter of the drain wire must be the same or nearly the same of the wire since the contacts on the IDC are the same physical size. In the present invention, since the contacts of the connector are not utilized to terminate the drain wires, no such requirement exists.
The present invention permits the use of coax cables with the readily available and relatively inexpensive IDC connectors by providing a ground termination bar for making the common ground termination, while still maintaining a relatively simple method of making the connection of the wire and the drain wire. The use of the ground termination bar also allows all the contacts of the connector to be available for signal conductors (wires).